I wish veteran feats were strong and not just mostly memes, Underrail's "end-game feats" just remind me of Dying Light's "Legend" skill tree, for which I was excited to find out what it was only for it to turn out it was just stat numbers like increasing the damage of certain weapons by a percent.
I mean, really?
- Choose between 15% damage against robots, 15% damage against machines and 10% damage against humanoids
- Increase the effective psi skill value of a specific school by 35%, but then all your psi is gone save for the reserves, but at that point you're already killing everything very fast and the real challenge is sustained enemy waves that psi cannot deal so well against
- +5% chance to dodge a ranged attack (lol), +5% chance to dodge a melee attack (Lol), -20% damage taken from explosions (LOL, the evasion from 12 agility builds already drastically reduces explosion damage)
- +10AP on Sprint, which is pretty decent because it's free AP without a drawback but has a huge agility requirement, making it not see the light of day often outside of specific builds
- +25MP if you're at lower than 35% health, which is also affected by armor penalty so it's kind of useless
- +10AP if you're at lower than 25% health, which is somewhat niche because it implies you would survive with low enough health if something brings you that low, but could be good in an emergency, unless you'd use it for absolute meme builds that rely on having permanently low health, but who would do that?
- +50% resolve, which is only impactful if you have plenty of Will, more than just 7, and resolve doesn't see much use because it's only somewhat useful against Thought Control
- Merchants have more money. That's it. Ignore the fact that you can just hop from merchant to merchant in the Underrail especially with the Juice and it only takes a few minutes
- +7% crit chance with weapons, which comes without any drawback, so that's decent
- +15MP, +15% movement speed outside of combat, absolute meme
- An additional +20% unarmed damage and a 5% chance to stun the target per punch, which is worthwhile if you're a pure unarmed build, but just like its predecessor it's useless for fist builds
- +30% damage with weapons while riding a jet ski and +10% stability. Not bad when combined with all the other feats for a total of +40% stability and +30% maneuverability, but is useless outside the Waterways and you need to join the Pirates for Improved Naval Combat before taking it.
- -30% damage taken from acid, heat, cold or electricity, but every tank takes electricity because it includes protecting against Thought Control damage
- +5 psi regeneration, it's just too little
- -10% armor penalty, which is a ridiculously small amount of armor penalty reduction, but can stack with Nimble.
- Multiplicative reduction of psi costs by 20%, but taking a 25% health hit to your health. Lower psi costs are always welcome.
Overall I'd say only a few veteran feats are feasible to take but only barely, and it's surprising how inferior they tend to be compared to regular feats.
I'd like to see more feats that upgrade existing feats. Aimed Shot gaining a critical damage bonus, Psychosis granting even more critical chance, Mania working for 2 spells instead of 1, Tranquility also reducing psi costs a fair amount (or lowering its threshold from full health to above 75% health), Flurry (the sword feat) granting an extra "life" or two so that you need to miss twice or thrice before it actually deactivates, Pyromaniac causing a percentage of damage to ignore resistances, Continuum Ripple having a chance to trigger on nearby enemies when you cast Temporal Distortion, Body Horror granting bonus critical damage against organics, removes the resolve penalty and grants special dialogue with the more insane doctors, researchers and cannibals in the Underrail, Super Slam dealing damage in an AoE, Hypothermia also lowering resistance to the cold by a percentage per stack, Paranoia reducing the AP cost of weapons and spells by a percentage for the first turn of combat but only if initiative was rolled, Beyond Cold making you completely immune to cold damage for the duration, he list goes on, the possibilities are very wide. People generally want feats that work with their build, not general and somewhat mundane ones that are barely useful, adding veteran feat variants for most feats that builds rely on would be one good way to improve them.
